To reduce music history to a pageant of masters is, at bottom, lazy. We stick with the known in order to avoid the hard work of exploring the unknown.
It is natural for humans to pursue something beautiful, while we should not pursue beauty blindly, intentionally ignoring the dirties under the beautiful skin. No matter the music history or the human history, what we are learning in the school is based on the textbooks that have been edited by some groups of scholars, who only display to us what they want us to know. Most people don’t question the truth of the history, just accepting the “knowledge”, which is, as the author says, a lazy behavior.
Looking back on the music history, most common people may immediately think of Beethoven or Chopin. Past musicians the public are most familiar with usually come to be white males. The adulation of white-male hero in the music circle makes laymen only know to praise their talent, forgetting to doubt why all these masterpieces were written by white men. Where are women? Where are the black?
Is “the known” we “stick to” real? Or the “pageant” in music is a fake, a self-recreation of white males. It reminds me of a best-selling book last year, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. The young, charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes makes up a fantastic background and draws a bright future for her startup in Silicon Valley, Theranos. A number of investors are attracted by the gorgeous veil of Theranos, by the beautiful appearance of Holmes. Nobody realizes it is an elaborated lie knitted by Homes, till the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou reveals the fraud.
It is hard to awaken a person who is pretending to be asleep. Some people are only willing to see what they think is correct, living in a world which is created for them, having no awareness to question the truth of their surroundings, unwilling to explore the unknown. Perhaps they enjoy being the role as Truman.